John Haase (left) & Paul Bennett were granted a royal pardon in 1996 after they had served 11 months of 18-year sentences for an #18m heroin smuggling plot (200)

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A POLICE officer discovered drug smuggler John Haase had been released from jail 17 years early when he bumped into him in a Liverpool pub, a court heard.

Kevin Clague, then a detective sergeant with Merseyside police, said he was shocked by the discovery.

He said: “I walked into a pub and he was there on the door. My first impression was that he might have escaped. I had to go outside and make a phone call.”

Haase and his nephew Paul Bennett are accused of engineering early releases from prison by planting guns and drugs across the country and blaming other criminals.

Prosecutors claim the plan worked so well, a judge was hoodwinked into recommending them for a royal pardon.

He jailed the pair for 18 years but wrote privately to the then home secretary Michael Howard, who freed them after only 11 months, the court was told.

Mr Clague said there were rumours within the police and through informers about Haase’s release.

He told Southwark crown court: “Everybody was saying he had pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes.

“My suspicions were aroused when the recoveries started.

“I always had it in the back of my mind that he must have provided other information. I always thought it could not just be the guns.”

Mr Clague said he became Haase’s “handler” – the person to whom Haase supplied information – after he arrested him at home in Maiden Lane, Clubmoor, for having a gun shoved down his trousers.

The jury was told Haase was bailed and arranged to meet Mr Clague and another police officer in the car park of the Dockers Club in Townsend Avenue, Clubmoor.

The court heard Haase provided information about a guns haul, a homemade bomb in a garden in Alexandra Drive, Bootle, and the location of items used in a recent armed robbery.

His sentencing judge was told of his co-operation and Haase, a criminal since the age of 16, received a suspended sentence for the gun offence, instead of the expected jailing.

Mr Clague said: “He said: ‘I don’t like you and I don’t like who you work for, but I haven’t got a lot of choice.’ He had no great love of the police, but he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

The court heard Haase and Bennett were arrested for smuggling heroin from Turkey shortly afterwards.

Mr Clague said he then went to see Haase in Walton prison.

He said Haase offered to supply information, namely the identities of British officers; high-ranking names in the Turkish police force; guns in the Czech Republic; and the whereabouts of a number of buried bodies.

But he told the jury he was then told to hand Haase as an informant to HM Customs because drugs was their domain.

Haase and Bennett are said to have orchestrated the hauls between October 1993 and August 1995 on mobile phones they used in prison while awaiting their sentences.

Haase and Bennett, both of no fixed address, deny conspiracy to pervert the course of public justice as does Haase’s wife,Deborah, 37 and her friend Sharon Knowles, 36.

Prosecutors claim Deborah Haase, of Teynham Avenue, Knowsley village, and Knowles, of Wadeson Road, Walton, were among those who helped Haase and Bennett on the outside.